Web Design 101

1. Decide your site's main purpose. Are you going to sell products? Offer services? Provide information about your company/organization/cause/self? Provide entertainment?

2. Decide on the level of support you plan to give your site. Will you answer email sent to the feedback address on the site? How often will you update the information on your site? If you're selling products, who will fulfull orders?

3. Gather the information you want to put on the site. If you're going to be selling items, this means collecting product descriptions, prices, stock#'s, photographs, etc. If you offer services, is it going to be a service that's delivered online, or will you provide information on how people can do business with you offline? If you're building an informative site, gather the information you want included on the site.

4. Decide on a domain name. This will likely be difficult, as many good domain names are already taken. Think about the name - is it easy to speak aloud? You'll want to avoid names with dashes in them, unless you plan to say "dash" whenever you tell someone your URL, and try to avoid long names (over 16 characters). You should also steer clear of numbers, because "2" spoken aloud can be misunderstood as "two", "to", or "too".

   Once you've decided on a domain name that's available, you'll need to register the domain. There are a number of domain registration companies that offer this service inexpensively. My personal favorite is Dotster, but there are lots of others. You may want to search on Yahoo or Google and compare prices.

5. Decide where you're going to host your site. Are you going to use your own server? If so, where are you going to put it? If you're a large company that already has internet service, this may be as simple as installing the new server in your machine room, but if you don't have a full-time high speed data line to your location, you'll need to host elsewhere. You can co-locate your machine at an ISP's site (which will run you anywhere from $200-500+ per month), or seek virtual hosting on an ISP (which can cost $10 and up depending on the ISP and services you receive).

6. Decide who's going to design the site. Are you going to do it yourself, or hire someone? If you do it yourself, do you know HTML, and basic web design principles? There are a number of software programs (such as Dreamweaver) that can help you with this, or you can use an automatic page builder like WebTemplates.

7. Build the site. Be sure to follow these web design tips, and consult the Yale Style Manual

8. Test, test, test. You can do this manually by viewing every page, making sure all the images load, that the site is visually appealing, and that all the links work.

9. Launch the site. Post announcements to newsgroups and relevant mailing lists. Add your URL to company literature, catalogs, business cards. Submit your site to search engines. Promote your site.

10. Maintenance. There is no "end" to web design - once a site is launched, you are forever in the maintenance phase. Prune old links. Add new material. Answer mail. Fill orders. Enjoy. :)